


Lost Girls

by Missy



Category: Wicked Girls - Seanan McGuire (Song)
Genre: Adulthood, Chance Meetings, Coping, First Meetings, Gen, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:02:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27248473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: Wendy stops at the bed and breakfast out of curiosity.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	Lost Girls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kira_katrine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kira_katrine/gifts).



Wendy stops by the little bed and breakfast on her way to Indiana. It’s small and quiet and out of the way and she can spend hours drawing and journaling while Albert does his duty elsewhere.

It’s peaceful in Kansas, and everywhere she looks, the hills roll out, flat and bland, the seas of wheat this country’s anthem speaks of (Wendy thinks it’s the national anthem, anyway). She takes her tea out on the porch with some pancakes and bacon – a very American meal, there’s no lemon, no sausage, and no beans.

The young woman with dark braids and a blue pinafore who runs the place asks her what she’s doing in town. “My husband’s on a lecturing tour. He’s an obstetrician,” said Wendy. 

“Ahh,” the girl says, without looking up from her pad. She finishes scribbling Wendy’s order before heading to the back. “You must have a lot of children.”

“Yes, four.” And this is something of a respite from them, though Wendy would never say so.

“That sounds…interesting,” Dorothy says, as if the notion of having children is a foreign concept to her.

Wendy smiles at the woman’s impish behavior. There’s something about her that reminds her of….

…She bites her lip. _Stop thinking of them,_ she tells herself. Neverland was long gone, Peter Pan driven off by her choice to become a woman with a woman’s responsibilities. When the girl – Dorothy, her nametag says – comes back with her plate, she eats and smiles as the girls bustle around. She sips sweet tea under the hot summer sun.

As Dorothy bends over the table, Wendy can’t help but say, “you just remind me so much of someone I knew. Someone who could fly.”

She regrets the words the second they’re out of her mouth. They mark her out as the lost girl she’s been trying not to be, the half-grown wild girl who wants to remember the smell of night-blooming jasmine, the feeling of the wind in her hair, the sound of steel clashing with steel on the rolling deck of a pirate ship.

Instead, Dorothy jerks to her feet, wood, like an automaton gone rogue. 

The words come from her panicked, whispery. “I used to dream that I could fly, too,” the girl says, and runs away, as if admitting to the farce of their lives – to the sheer disparity between what was given up and what they had chosen to shoulder as adult women – would fall apart with a tug of their clumsy hands.


End file.
